Gold and Longing
by sirsparklepants
Summary: Severus Snape and Captain Jack Sparrow. How they both survived. Series of loosely connected ficlets.
1. How Snape Survived

**Gold and Longing  
How Snape Survived (Without The Cliches)  
Pixie  
Notes**: I would first like to properly assign blame. This ficbit is entirely the fault of **mizzmoonyluver** on LiveJournal and her UndeadAztecGold!Snape. Link such as there can be here at the bottom. The next one is the fault of **honilee**, also on LiveJournal. The third is the fault of my science teacher for being _so damn boring_ while she's reviewing for the benchmark, and the fourth is the fault of my muses tinkering with my curiosity. So I am in no way, shape, or form responsible for this insanity.**  
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He had first acquired the trinket from an ageless man with black dreadlocks and a strange liquid take on the traditional lower-class British accent. Snape had assumed he was foreign, or mad, or both – his dress seemed to support it, at least, as did his manner of conduct.

The man had smiled at him, showing glints of gold, telling him as he pressed it into his hand, "You come find Cap'n Jack once you figure what this really is about."

Snape, tired and haggard from his work as a quadruple agent and apparently looking it if strange people were forcing good-luck tokens upon him, had neither the time nor the energy to refuse, and so he simply took the coin and tucked it into his pocket.

By the time he realized what the Aztec gold truly did, he was far too embroiled in the Voldemort business to go searching out this Captain Jack who had given him the curse. Besides, there was at least one benefit to it – feeling nothing included the horrible bone-melting pain of Cruciatus as well.

Idly watching the flesh on his chest form and melt away as his skeletal hand cast a shadow on it as it moved, Snape decided he could see one – no, two – more upsides to the whole thing. He didn't die, of course, and now everyone would leave him alone to brew his potions in peace.

But he supposed he should finally seek out this Captain person who had pressed this upon him – find out why, for instance, and also if there were any other nasty surprises lurking in his future.

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The picture: mizzmoonyluver (dot) livejournal (dot) com (slash) 11310 (dot) html 


	2. Why Jack Didn't Die

**Gold and Longing  
Why Jack Didn't Die  
Pixie  
Notes**: I would first like to properly assign blame. This ficbit is entirely the fault of **honilee**, on LiveJournal. The third is the fault of my science teacher for being _so damn boring_ while she's reviewing for the benchmark, and the fourth is the fault of my muses tinkering with my curiosity. So I am in no way, shape, or form responsible for this insanity.**  
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Jack had always aged more slowly than your average man, and much more slowly than your average rum-soaked malnourished pirate captain. He suspected that there was something in his ancestry that his father wasn't telling him, because Teague (and wasn't that a poor pirate name? Jack had changed his as soon as he stole his first ship) had been Keeper of the Code for longer than anyone else could remember. Maybe it was simply something about being birthed and raised in the cove, spending years there, because in the damp caves time seemed to slow to a crawl, and the air had clung to Jack all his life.

So it was no surprise to him that he outlived that whelp of Bootstrap's and his girl with nary a change. It was, however, a shock when some years later he pulled into port and found that the eyes staring back at him were a little older, the flesh covering his face a little looser and more deeply furrowed, the black of his dreadlocks invaded by a few strands of silver. And suddenly, the immortal Captain Jack Sparrow whose name was whispered everywhere still even though piracy was dying, had to face the fact that he, also, was dying – would one day eventually die, never to rise again and enjoy life.

But Jack had never been one to give up easily, and he didn't want to face his own mortality. To him, death was an enemy to be conquered, one who kept coming back for more even though it had been beaten several times. The Kraken, the Locker, the Isla de Muerta – all of these Jack had survived.

Thinking about his old victories gave him an idea, though, and one day he stole a ship – a small one, mind you, as he had never quite found the time to master crewing a ship all by his onesies, what with being chased by His Majesty's Royal Navy and all – and sailed to the island that no one could find unless they knew where it was. There, he found many glittering jewels and heaps of golden coins and trinkets that made his mouth water (Jack wondered why he had never brought himself back here before, and then thought _Norrington_, with the surprise of one who stumbles across a thought in his mind that had been hiding for several months) but most importantly he found a chest. When he opened it, it was full of slightly irregular coins marked with a crude skull stamp and stained with blood.

He remembered the feeling from his own brief experience as a walking skeleton, years and years and years ago. He finds, as he thought, that it does not nearly compare to the isolation and fear and loneliness and absolute certainty that this was the end, he would never be rescued of the Locker. He can live like this for a long while. 


	3. Why Jack Spread The Wealth

**Gold and Longing  
Why Jack Spread The Wealth  
Pixie  
Notes**: I would first like to properly assign blame. This ficbit is entirely the fault of my science teacher for being _so damn boring_ while she's reviewing for the benchmark, and the fourth is the fault of my muses tinkering with my curiosity. So I am in no way, shape, or form responsible for this insanity.**  
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The short version was Jack wanted to play a grand old joke on the world, seeing as how long long ago the world made him a pirate reluctant to die even with both his loved ones and his profession. At least, that's what he tells anyone who asks. 

But Jack knows that his true mistresses will never leave him; his dark and wild ladies, the sea and the Pearl. Just as they had made sure he could stay on this earth with them a bit longer than was natural.

But while they would never abandon him entirely, sometimes they withdrew their favor only to rain it down on some other lad, knowing full well what they were doing to him and laughing madly all the way. And while Jack knew that eventually they would come back, maybe a little more battered, ravished and wanton and not regretting a moment, in the meantime he got lonely. Too, even with their companionship he still hadn't managed to crew a ship meant for fifty all on his own, that horrible maddening time in the Locker notwithstanding.

Besides, he remembers many times in his long natural life before the gold when he would have been very grateful for some handsome, charismatic stranger to hand him an effortless way to feel nothing. Jack knows that there are many people out there who feel exactly the same right now, so he seeks them out and presses the gold into their hands.

He waits for them to understand that the price of never dying is never living, and then they find him. If they want to live again, he lets them, unless they would be particularly useful on a pirate ship, in which case he summarily kidnaps them. Jack has changed over the centuries, but not that much.


End file.
